The advent of adaptive bitrate streaming via protocols, such as Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) Live Streaming (HLS), Smooth Streaming and Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) allow content delivery over unmanaged networks to be viewed by client devices under varying network conditions. If the network conditions deteriorate for an appreciable period of time, clients can access lower bandwidth representations of the content without a loss of service. In adaptive streaming, multiple bitrate representations of the content are made available on HTTP streaming servers. The client is able to ‘pull’ content from HTTP servers based on the condition of the network and available bandwidth the client can ingest.
It is desirable to improve upon the manner in which a client requests and receives playlist files using adaptive streaming. In adaptive streaming environments, a client is able to locate media of a live service by requesting a manifest or playlist associated with that particular service. Typically in an HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) environment, a client requests the ‘high-level’ playlist file (.m3u8) and depending on available bandwidth, requests the ‘low-level’ playlist containing the ‘bandwidth appropriate’ representations of the media. From this ‘low-level’ playlist file, the uniform resource identifier (URI) of the current media segment is requested (via an HTTP Get or Byte-Range Get).
Most commonly, efforts to reduce channel change times are focused on Internet protocol television (IPTV) Internet Protocol (IP) multicast environment with unicast bursts of IP media. With the popularity of adaptive bitrate streaming techniques, reduction of channel tune times are focused on optimized signaling methods.
It is noted that while the accompanying FIGs. serve to illustrate embodiments of concepts that include the claimed invention, and explain various principles and advantages of those embodiments, the concepts displayed are not necessary to understand the embodiments of the present invention, as the details depicted in the FIGs. would be readily apparent to those of ordinary skill in the art having the benefit of the description herein.